The usual protocol would have been for an aircraft of dubious status to get a warning from the nearest ATC. Unless they were in airspace over a war zone, military intervention was typically a way down the list.
‘What did he say?’
Ari opened his mouth to reply, but the man he was talking about decided to insert himself into the conversation.
‘Unknown civilian aircraft in our sector, this is F-A-M. State your identity, heading and fuel status, over.’
The voice of the interceptor pilot was husky and quick, muffled by the cover of an oxygen mask.
‘He said that,’ Ari explained. ‘And I gave him the answer already.’ He toggled the radio. ‘F-A-M intercept, this is, uh, CargoTransit Nine Nine Heavy. Did you not copy our last? We have responded to your challenge, what is the issue, over?’
‘There they are.’
Marc jabbed a finger out at the evening sky and Ari found a pair of sleek shapes in a two-ship formation off the port wing.
He recognised the characteristic ‘lawn dart’ silhouette. The camouflaged aircraft were MiG-21s, Russian-made fighter-interceptors. Ari had frequently crossed paths with the type of same aircraft flying Syrian or Egyptian colours, during his time with the Israeli Air Corps.
‘I see heat-seekers on their rails,’ added Marc. ‘And drop tanks. That could mean they’ve been loitering up here for a while.’
Ari nodded. ‘I have no doubt.’
‘This might just be bad timing . . .’
The Englishman didn’t have the conviction to sell the point. Instead, Marc pulled some maps from the chart bin and began leafing through them.
‘Mama always said to me, Ari, never forget it can always get worse.’
As if to make dear Mama’s point for her, the lead pilot radioed again.
‘Unknown civilian aircraft, this is F-A-M. There is a problem. You are suspected of smuggling and aiding terrorists, very serious. You will change course to . . .’ The pilot fell silent for a moment, possibly conferring with his wingman. When he returned, the pace of his words picked up. ‘Yes, you will change course to Lichinga, where you will land immediately, do you understand, over?’
‘Lichinga . . .’ Marc ran a finger over the map, quickly finding the location. ‘That’s an airport, south of our current position.’
‘Civilian, not a military base,’ said Ari. ‘How about that?’ He considered the situation. ‘He sounds pretty rattled, eh? This smells fishy. No ATC challenge, no real explanation, and now trying to divert us to some random airstrip.’
‘The nearest military airbase is at Nampula, off to the south-east,’ said Marc. ‘If this was a proper intercept, he’d divert us there.’
‘Good point.’ Ari keyed his microphone. ‘F-A-M intercept, CargoTransit Nine Nine Heavy responding. We can divert to Nampula, that runway is more suited to our aircraft—’
The interceptor pilot didn’t allow Ari to finish, and barked out a reply.
‘Negative! You do as I say! Descend to land at Lichinga or you will be shot down, these are your orders!’
‘Rude,’ muttered Ari. ‘This fellow seems quite highly strung.’
‘Let me give him a poke, yeah?’ Off a nod from him, Marc slipped on a radio headset and added his own question. ‘F-A-M intercept, we are carrying a cargo of . . . uh . . . tractor parts, we have nothing to do with smugglers or terrorists.’
‘Do not argue!’ the interceptor pilot spat back. ‘We know who you are – we were told! Divert course or we will deal with you!’
The trailing MiG peeled off, while the leader dropped back.
‘I think your mum was right,’ said Marc, after a moment. ‘Someone’s tipped off these blokes to look out for us. And that’s a whole new problem.’
From out of nowhere, a flash of white tracer arced across the nose of the Airbus, cutting through the sky like bolts from some sci-fi blaster. Ari and Marc both recoiled in their seats, and the jet shuddered as the lead MiG-21 followed a heartbeat later, thundering across their path to veer up and back around.
‘That was your only warning,’ said the voice over the radio.
Ari gripped the flight yoke and put the jet into a slow southerly turn, weighing the situation.
‘If the Combine have someone inside the local military,’ he began, ‘if they’ve activated them, how much do they know about our intentions?’
‘This could just be a couple of fighter jocks who’ve been offered a bag of cash to put us down somewhere,’ countered Marc. ‘I mean, the Combine aren’t omnipresent, but their money is.’
Ari glanced at the radar, seeing the MiGs drop into formation behind them.
‘The outcome is still the same. We are in the shit.’
‘I don’t disagree.’
An indicator on the control panel lit up orange-red and a familiar high-frequency tone sounded in the cockpit. Both former military aviators, Ari and Marc knew the sound of a missile threat alert. Civilian jets like the Airbus A350 didn’t come with that kind of detection gear as standard, but Solomon’s private aircraft had a lot of special modifications. One of the key devices was a MAW – a Missile Approach Warning system, technology that used passive laser detectors, capable of picking up the output of infrared heads on the tips of the deadly heat-seekers.
‘He’s going for a lock-on,’ said Marc. ‘We really pissed him off!’
‘Countermeasures are on the right side panel,’ Ari snapped, jabbing a finger in the direction of the console. ‘I’m going to pretend our girl here is a fighter jet, you make with the distractions.’
Marc shot him a look. ‘I know you’re good, but even you can’t outfly two MiGs with this bus.’
‘Sad but true.’ Ari reached for another sub-panel at his side, powering up another of the jet’s clandestine systems. ‘But we can shake them up . . .’
The MAW warning changed from a wheedling high-low cadence to a steady call, indicating an imminent attack, and Marc swore under his breath. He reached for the countermeasures console and pushed a release button marked I-R.
‘Flares away!’
*
Pop-open panels beneath the tail of the Airbus ejected a scatter of silver tubes, which burst into blinding white fire as they fell into the jet’s wake. The magnesium flares burned sun-hot, instantly giving the interceptors a huge false return for their heat-seeking missiles.
From inside the rear cabin, Lucy saw the brilliant white glow and knew exactly what it meant. More than once she had flown into the airbase at Kandahar, aboard a C-130 spitting ‘angel’ flares to baffle Taliban anti-aircraft launchers. She gripped the armrests of her seat and did the same thing she had then, putting her faith in the pilot to get her down in one piece.
‘Ya Allah!’ gasped Assim, from the seat next to her. ‘Are we on fire?’
‘Not yet,’ said Solomon.
He and Malte had joined them moments after Marc sprinted off to the cockpit.
The Finn said nothing, staring straight ahead.
‘That is not very reassuring,’ Assim added.
Lucy was only half-listening. Through the window, she made out one of the interceptors veering wildly away, but the lead was still tucked in close, too close for a missile attack.
But near enough to use his guns.
A white spark lit up along the MiG’s midline as the pilot triggered the interceptor’s 23 mm autocannon, and fresh bursts of tracer bracketed the Airbus.
*
Marc felt the rounds hit the jet more than he heard them, the thick bullets smacking the fuselage with enough force to send a shock all the way forward to the co-pilot’s seat.
A scattering of crimson indicators bloomed across the control panel, but Ari was already on top of it, his hands dancing over the field of switches with the dexterity of a concert pianist.
‘All right,’ said the pilot, icily calm despite the danger. ‘The gloves are off now.’ He shot Marc a look. ‘Have you been briefed on the Stinger?’
&nb
sp; ‘I thought that thing was still being tested.’ Marc suddenly realised what Ari had been fiddling with before the gun attack, and forced himself to focus. ‘Does it actually work?’
‘Yes, and I don’t know. Solomon’s technical people fitted it a few months back, but we never had a hot check, so you might consider this a field trial.’ He jerked his thumb at a shrouded panel at the rear of the flight deck, next to the jump seat. ‘Go, get in there!’
Marc did as he was told, scrambling out of the co-pilot’s position, and dragging himself back over the sharply canted deck as Ari made another turn.
Unlocking the jump seat panel revealed a multifunction digital screen and a stubby joystick. It was styled like an arcade video game, but the tech was military specification.
A power level monitor told him the battery packs in the hold were ready to discharge, and he flicked on the screen. Like an eyelid opening, the display blinked and suddenly Marc had an inverted view looking along the curve of the Airbus’s ventral fuselage. The horizontal tailplanes were visible in the middle of the screen, blanked with an overlay cross-hatched in red. He gave the joystick an experimental flick, and the view shifted.
Down on the belly of the Airbus, a panel slid back to let a hemispheric turret emerge, the half-globe resembling the bulbous eye of some mechanical insect. It turned to track the trailing MiG, passive mass and motion sensors picking out the pursuing jet as it moved against the darkening sky.
Marc saw what the turret saw, catching sight of the interceptor as a sharp-angled shadow weaving right and left as it tried to stay in the Airbus’s 6 o’clock position. It didn’t help that Ari Silber was doing manoeuvres with the Airbus that would have given her designers a heart attack.
The ground rolled hard around the display panel and Marc was shoved back into the jump seat by the force of another banking turn. He saw what Ari was up to, extending his angle to lead the MiG into making a wider pass.
The interceptor pilot fell for it. Marc pictured him smiling behind his oxygen mask, looking for the payback he was going to give them for that trick with the flares.
Mate, you don’t know the half of it.
Marc tapped the pre-fire control and a green light blinked. A set of cross hairs dividing the screen into quadrants drifted over the cloudscape and he steadied them on the shadow of the MiG. The Stinger didn’t need to make a direct hit on its target; a glancing pass would do just as well.
‘Ready. Ready. Firing!’
Marc squeezed the push-button trigger on the joystick and the screen whited out.
*
There was no sound of discharge, no recoil, no flash of light.
The beam from the emitter in the turret was invisible to the human eye – an oxygen-iodine laser in the 4000 megawatt range. It was too weak to burn through metal and inflict any physical damage on the pursuing MiG, but that wasn’t the point. The laser’s energy was specifically tuned to excite molecules present in the canopy of any attacking aircraft, so the effect of a successful hit briefly turned the pane of the MiG’s windscreen into a flashgun.
For a split second, the inside of the MiG’s cockpit lit up like a sunburst. The FAM pilot reacted with a scream and clapped one hand to his face, but he was too late to save his vision. Distorted purple after-images crowded his retinas, rendering him temporarily blind. Raging angrily into his microphone, the pilot fought with his plane, unable to read his controls.
*
‘Good hit,’ reported Marc, as the monitor returned to an active state. ‘Target one is veering off, motion is erratic.’
‘He’ll get his sight back in a few minutes, if he doesn’t fly himself into the dirt in the meantime.’
Ari searched the radar for the other jet. He hoped the other pilot would do the decent thing and form up alongside his buddy, to talk him through his predicament.
Instead, the MAW signal began to wail again, as the second MiG ignored his wingman and came around on an attack run.
‘He’s staying out of gun range,’ said Marc, trying to follow the other jet with the turret.
That meant they would be facing one or more air-to-air missiles.
‘I’m taking her down,’ said Ari. ‘The ground clutter will mask us.’
Marc nodded. ‘I can’t hit him at that distance.’
Ari shook his head. ‘Forget it. Run the countermeasures instead.’
‘Roger that.’ Marc swapped seats once more, as the MAW’s wailing grew louder.
‘You are going to die.’ The voice snarled over the guard channel. ‘He said, tell Solomon that he should never have come back!’
‘Shut that idiot up,’ muttered Ari, and Marc switched off the radio. ‘I ever tell you my war story about the turkey shoot?’
‘The what?’ Marc shot him a confused look. ‘Ari, this is not the time!’
‘Oh, no,’ he disagreed, ‘it is. Helps me concentrate.’ The Airbus’s altimeter spiralled down as they descended over the savannah. ‘See, the Syrians were putting SAMs into the Bekaa Valley, so we flew out to show them the folly of their intentions and—’
A flashing red alert blinked twice and Ari caught his breath.
‘He’s launched!’ called Marc. ‘One off . . . No, two!’
Somewhere behind them, a pair of AA-2 Atoll missiles were loose, their seeker heads finding the heat signatures from the Airbus’s Rolls-Royce engines. At full burn, there were only seconds before a fatal impact.
The pilot continued his story, as if they were out on some pleasure flight.
‘So I said to my wingman . . .’ Ari gulped in a breath as he worked the throttle cluster. ‘Eli, I said, it’s good as long as you don’t hear the bad sound, and he said to me, Ari, what’s the bad sound?’
‘It’s that,’ said Marc, as the MAW began to scream.
‘It is,’ agreed Ari.
‘Counters away!’
Marc didn’t dare wait a moment longer, and he flicked the switches to send another torrent of anti-missile flares out into the Airbus’s jet stream.
*
The first Atoll took the bait, sensing the bloom of heat and light, and it pivoted like a falling arrow, straight into the fiery mass of the flares. Losing its lock-on, the missile began to waver, before it finally lost all sign of its target and plunged towards the ground, blasting a shallow crater in the hillside.
The second missile hit the tail end of the flare bursts and its primitive control system became confused. For a second, the sky around it was filled with too many potential targets burning brightly, so many so that it could not tell where its objective lay. But the second Atoll’s warhead had been primed with a proximity fuse instead of an impact trigger.
It exploded in mid-air, below and to one side of the Airbus, beneath the tip of the starboard wing. A cloud of shrapnel and fire ballooned, the force of the detonation shoving the wing upwards and clawing across the underside of the jet.
The missile detonation acted like a colossal shotgun blast into the starboard-side engine, ripping it apart. The fast-spinning turbine blades inside the engine cowling fractured and splintered, magnifying the damage done. Shards of razor-edged metal tore up through the wing and control surfaces, while dislocated bolts became bullets that cracked windows and punched holes in the fuselage.
The Airbus gave a low animal groan, and it skidded sideways through the sky. Trailing streamers of black smoke and pieces of metal, the jet began a terminal fall towards the dark wilderness below.
*
Agony rolled through Marc’s skull, down his neck and across his shoulders. He was aware of blood streaming from a cut above his eye, and everything felt thick and slow.
Ari was calling his name and he rocked back in his seat.
Something blew up, said a ghostly voice in the distance. Did you hit your head?
A hard, cold wind shrieked around him in a banshee howl, pulling at the shattered remains of a broken window on the starboard side of the cabin. The air was thin and polar cold but breathabl
e, and Marc blinked away his daze, seeing blood smeared on the control panel in front of him. He had the nauseating sense that he had lost time. There had been an abrupt lurch to port, and he remembered sudden pain and sparks of fire behind his eyes.
‘You okay?’ said Ari, around a wet cough. ‘Lost you for a minute.’
‘Yeah . . . ?’
Marc focused on the first thing he saw – the view out over the nose. The rolling plans of African savannah below them were parting to offer up a narrow ribbon of brown roadway in the middle of nowhere. The Airbus was dropping towards the ground at a giddying rate and Marc shook his head, as if that might dispel the image. He regretted that instantly, the pain returning with a vengeance.
‘Don’t worry, I’m just putting her on the deck.’ Ari’s voice was tight. ‘Gear down . . .’
He pulled the lever to deploy the undercarriage, wincing with the effort.
‘That’s not a runway,’ Marc said thickly.
It was hard to get his thoughts in order, each one moving too slowly.
Do you have a concussion? The ghost voice asked another question.
‘No, but close enough, eh?’ Ari drew back on the throttle. ‘Flaps, Marc, can you . . . ?’
‘Flaps, yeah.’ He leaned in and deployed the control surfaces, grimacing at the number of red lights that came on. ‘Done it.’ Marc gritted his teeth, ignoring the pounding in his head.
Out through the missing window and the ragged tear in the side of the flight deck, Marc saw the black flashes of tree canopies streaking past, and unconsciously pulled tighter on his seat restraints.
‘Brace, brace!’ shouted Ari, his voice echoing back down the length of the plane over the on-board PA. ‘Marc,’ he said, without looking up from the controls, his voice dropping low. ‘Talk to Vada for me, will you?’
Who is that?
For a moment, Marc couldn’t connect the name with anyone he knew.
*
The Airbus hit the hard-packed dirt road and bounced off it. There hadn’t been rains in this part of the country for some time, so the ground was parched and dusty. A cloud of earth erupted around the aircraft and swirled into harsh vortices. Flames licking at the gutted shell of the starboard-side engine blazed as the jet briefly left the ground and then came down again with a tortured, grinding crunch.
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